Yes, the Internet of things will be great, once we get the mess untangled

[Commentary] If you thought the in-house data silos of the client-server era were a nightmare, get ready for the hairball that the Internet of things could engender.

As tens of billions of “things” -- sensors, machines, mobile devices -- get connected to the Internet and to each other, there will be huge value in the data they generate across applications ranging from agriculture, to senior care, to public works. But there’s a lot of heavy lifting to do first.

We know we can collect the data -- but how to process it, analyze it and share it securely in a way that makes sense and doesn’t give people the heebie-jeebies? Some parts of the Internet infrastructure are ready for this IoT onslaught already.

“If just 15 to 18 percent of all dark fiber is lit up now, there’s still tremendous amount of capacity available,” said Chad Jones, VP of LogMeIn’s Xively IoT business. “It’s not that we need the pipes, but we do need a ton of infrastructure atop the pipes. The next thing is we’ll need a bunch of clouds meeting different requirements from all these data sources and we’ll need business intelligence and stream processors etc.,” he noted.